Tag: garlic

For almost a year, I've been looking for a way to cook tip roast that doesn't end up overly chewy- for some reason, it seems even a long bath in the crock-pot is too much for one's round tip roast. Tonight, I was determined to come up with a solution, and I am disturbingly pleased by the result.

It started with a small round tip roast, which I tried to murder horribly with a fork before dredging in flour, onion powder, and garlic powder. Then, I heated a 10-inch calphalon pan with a small amount of canola and added a pinch of cumin seed and three cloves of garlic. I browned the tip roast quickly, then just as quickly burned off a shot of cognac.

After this, I added one can of chicken broth, a pound of celery hearts (halved), and a can of tomato sauce; one dash of hot sauce and a pinch of freshly ground chiles and it was ready to go in the oven at 350 degrees.

An hour later, I pulled out the roast and celery and covered them with foil; added a little more flour to thicken as well as a shot of soy sauce and a dash of worcestershire. I whisked this down, mounted the sauce with half a stick of butter (for shine), and then served it over the sliced roast and the celery.

It turned out pretty fantastic. I used a very small roast, so there was an overabundance of sauce this time around; I think I'll make a little more next time.

After looking online and not finding a chicken and dumplings recipe I liked, I tried this:

 

1. Saute an almost-mirepoix of shallots, celery, and carrots in olive oil; add three cubed chicken thighs and chicken stock.

2. Mix 1 1/4 cup flour with 1 tsp salt, 1 tbsp baking powder, and one egg; slowly add milk until it becomes a dough and loses its stickiness.

3. Season your chicken with pepper, tarragon, onion powder, garlic powder, soy sauce, and worcestershire. Add one can cream of celery soup and a bay leaf.

4. Add the dough in teaspoonfuls; cover. After five minutes, remove cover and flip.

 

Simple, no? This turned out really, really awesome.

So tart-on wanted me to make her enchiladas, out of Mexicans, for eating. Not having any idea how to make them, I read four or five recipes online for common ingredients (this is how I research all recipes), then promptly forgot everything I read and just started cooking.

I started with some canola oil and about four cloves of garlic, minced. To this I added about two tablespoons of ground chiles (dried red, ancho, and california pods), paprika, chili powder (a lot), cumin, and onion powder. After this started to smell like enchiladas, I browned two chicken thighs on both sides, then poured in two cups of chicken broth and put on the cover for about fifteen minutes (on medium high).

After the chicken was cooked, I shredded it with a fork while the chicken broth reduced on high. Then I pulled the tortillas out of the oven (what? Where did the tortillas come from? I forgot to mention, I put some in the oven at 170 so they wouldn't break when I tried to roll them) and rolled them around the chicken before I put them in a square glass baking dish.

By the time I filled the dish and set the oven for 350 degrees, the chicken broth was reduced to the point where I could start making a sauce. I added two cans of tomato sauce, some garlic powder, some more chili powder, some dried parsley, about two tablespoons of cocoa powder (heck yes), and a little pepper. The chicken broth was salty enough so that I didn't need to add any salt.

After the sauce all came together, I poured it into the baking dish, covered the top with cheddar, and put it into the oven for half an hour. This is awesome. Eat enchiladas. Every day, until you die.

Ingredients:

• 1 pkg of stew meat, browned.
• 2 california chile pods
• 6-10 small red peppers.
• 2 pasilla (dried ancho) chile pods.
• 6-10 small arbol chili pods.
• 3 jalapenos
• 1 can tomato sauce
• white pepper, to taste
• 1 tbsp chili powder
• garlic salt
• onion powder
• celery seed
• cumin
• 2 cans beef consomme
• 1 can chicken broth
• 1 bottle newcastle
• 1 cup ground tortilla strips

After browning the stew meat, I threw it in a crock pot along with all the dried peppers (ground), the tomato sauce, the beef consomme, the chicken broth, and the beer. I ran the jalapenos through the blender, and added them as well as the remainder of the ingredients. Easy, right? Other than running everything through the blender, the only work is browning the stew meat and occasionally stirring (I used a whisk as well). After that, I left it to cook all day- with the occasional taste and spice/salt adjustment. How will it turn out? We'll see, after tonight.

And set yourself on fire you shall. Particularly after eating this atrocity I invented last night.

Software:
1/2 lb. Ground Beef
1/2 yellow onion, diced.
1 med. Red Bell Pepper diced (this is a chile too, btw)
3 Habanero Chiles diced fine (fresh)
3 Thai Chiles diced fine (fresh)
1 Random Chile diced fine (Seriously. I bought a fresh "Hungarian" Chile from Vons. 
                                       Who the hell knows what subspecies of capsicum it is.)
2 Jalapenos diced fine (fresh)
3 tsp. Cayenne Chile (powder)
4 tsp. Naga Jolokia Chile (powder)
1 can Chipotles in Adobo (only use 5 of the chiles or so, diced)
1 14.5oz can Ranch Style beans
5 tsp. chili powder (I use homemade, store bought is sawdust)
1 cup beer (I used Peroni, because thats what I had)
Garlic Salt
Salt and Pepper

1. Brown the ground beef in a skillet, once browned, throw in onion and bell pepper. Season with Garlic Salt and Pepper to taste.
2. Done! (just kidding.)
3. Or am I?
4. No, I am. Drain the fat from the skillet. Throw in all diced chiles except the Chipotles. Soften.
5. In a soup pot, stock pot, pot of some kind, combine meat mixture, and rest of the ingredients.
6. Cook until it tastes good. Or until you can't taste anything because the chiles have beaten your
    tastebuds into submission/mass suicide.

 

On a side note: I wish the preview pane hadn't gone away, but I do like the new post editor Tele.

Disclaimer: The below contains cynicism. If you think this is a kind of disease, I suggest you go beat yourself over the head with an iron.

It was Indian night, and I've never so much as had a curry.

Nevertheless, I had a great evil plan in the works: I was going to cook Indian food pretty much the same way as I cook all food, by sort of looking at a recipe on the internet and then adapting it for my own evil purposes. I was going to do this because I had zero idea what kind of spices I was going to be using, what the end result was supposed to be, and whether or not what I cooked could be considered as poison in the right jurisdictions.

The recipe starts with a cup of masoor daal, which the internet tells me is some magical, rare variety of lentil. Since I wasn't about to go on a Fancy Steve style treasure hunt just to find a lentil that probably tastes exactly the same as normal lentils, I used mealworms. Okay. Fine. I used lentils. But if the original dish was supposed to be all squirmy, everybody was going to be totally disappointed.

The instructions were to wash the lentils. I sighed heavily and hoped somebody would notice how I was pretty much martyring myself just so I could cook food invented by people who don't even eat prime rib. Unfortunately, there really wasn't anybody paying attention to me, not even me, so I finally gave up and washed the lentils. The tremendous sacrifices I make for these parties, right?

The next instructions from the supreme commander, aka The Interwebtubes, was to mix the lentils with water, cooking oil, turmeric, red chili powder, salt, onion, and tomato in some sort of pot. Whoa. That's a lot to process all at once. I'd be posting the amount of the ingredients here, but I wasn't really paying attention anyways. I finely chopped a massive onion and three tomatoes (I was making a triple-size recipe, for the gathering) and added these to the pot. Turmeric? I had that, because everything indian ever apparently needs it. For those of you wondering, it tastes yellow. The mexitexans probably say it tastes amarillo, which is a gay Texan way to say yellow. And what's this "red chili powder"? I judiciously decided this meant both red pepper and chili powder, both of which I have, because I am a man. So I dumped a lot of those in there.

Basically, after that point, I let everything cook for an hour and a half. Then I went and played video games. When the smoke alarm went off, I looked for a save point, saved my totally awesome robot ninja, and then went back to the kitchen. I was supposed to melt some ghee, which is Indian for "butter of the gods". I am not kidding. It smelled like delicious, and it comes in what looks like a Folger's can. After it was melted, I threw in some cumin seeds ("Hiss," said the seeds). In went a gallon of garlic and a metric buttload of dried chilies, which I crushed in my hands like beer cans. After everything smelled fried enough, I threw it into the lentils, mixed them all up, and was done with it.

I should mention that I was supposed to add something called asafoetida, which kills unborn babies, smells horrible, and attracts wolves. Since I know some unborn babies and not many wolves, I was going to add it, but that would have involved wandering around the smelly part of the international market, so I refrained. Instead I added saffron, which is expensive, in the hopes that it would make all the food taste like magic. Instead, it made everything smell like flowers.

Okay, I gave it a taste. But after I spit that out and gargled with bleach, I figured everything was alright. I put it in a bowl, drove over to Fancy's, and pre-dialed the ambulance. 

 

Last night, I decided to do away with a bunch of leeks by whipping up some sort of soup with them, mostly because I'd wanted to try vichysoisse for months. I can now say that, whatever it is I made last night, I ate it and it was fantastic.

 

• 3 leeks, chopped fine
• 6 red potatoes, cut thinly
• 2 cans of chicken broth
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
• 4 pieces bacon
• 1 pint cream
• garlic salt
• pepper to taste
• 1/4 tsp celery seed
• 1/4 cup mild cheddar, shredded
• 1/2 cup romano, grated
• 1/4 cup portobello mushrooms, chopped
• 1/4 cup butter

I don't know why nobody ever told me that Alfredo sauce was easy to make, but I've wasted far too much of my life buying the glass jars of commercially made pasta sauce when a great alfredo is almost as easy.

Just last week, we were running a little short in the food department, so it came time to try and scrounge what we could out of what was sitting around in the house. To that end, I collected the following ingredients:

• 2 cans evaporated milk (heavy cream would be better...)
• 1/8 lb. Parmigiano-Reggiano, shredded
• Lots of black pepper
• 1 stick butter
• Garlic salt
• 1 bag egg noodles

I melted the butter while the pasta started boiling. Once completely melted, I added the milk and whisked it all together, then whisked in the pepper and garlic salt. After the egg noodles were done, I drained them thoroughly, put them in the milk mixture, and began to fold in the cheese.

That's it. The best recipes are disgustingly simple. Although, after I ate the noodles, I felt like my heart was going to explode. This is some heavy stuff, friends. Don't get addicted.

I was seriously in need of some sour cream yesterday, so I browsed the internet for a couple beef stroganoff recipes and generated something that turned out to be pretty darn fantastic.

After slicing a half-pound sirloin steak into small strips, I dredged them in flour, garlic salt, and pepper, then sauteed them in butter along with a quarter onion (diced). I added a couple dashes of Worcestershire and soy sauce (that combo is my secret weapon for meat dishes). After the onion was transparent, I added some sliced mushrooms, a shot of apple cognac (any brandy would be fine), and half a can of chicken broth. Once the whole mixture thickened, I added half a cup of sour cream, reduced the heat to medium, and let the sauce thicken.

Over buttered egg noodles, this one was pretty fantastic. There was just a hint of the apple flavor from the cognac. If I do this again, I will wait to add the steak until after the onions are done; it certainly wasn't overcooked, but I would have liked it to be a little less cooked anyways.

Normally, when I cook, I like to find a recipe online, then cook something completely different. That way, every time I make something, it's an organic, unique recipe, and different whenever I make it. The few times a recipe comes out perfect, of course, I prepare it the same way; however, usually I'm trying to find a new way to make food.

And so today's recipe comes into play. I'd been browsing the chicken recipes in the wikibooks cookbook, and found my way to a recipe for Garlic Lemon Chicken. The thing that drew my attention was a Lebanese sauce named toum. So, after glancing at both recipes for about half a second, I was off.

The first goal was to make the toum. I knew that it involved garlic, olive oil, salt, and lemon juice; it was only about halfway through the recipe that I realized it required the oil and lemon juice to be added to the macerated garlic-salt mixture in small doses, to increase the volume. I'd also added cayenne to the recipe; the first taste, before I thinned it out with the garlic and oil, was like a garlic nuclear bomb.

I started by shucking two full bulbs of garlic and running them through the processor, then adding salt, pepper, cayenne, sesame oil (I was out of olive), and lemon juice, until I had a mighty bowl of deadly garlic paste. At this point in the recipe, my plan was to saute the chicken breasts, slather them with this liquid kryptonite, and then braise them for a scary long time.

Things changed when I noticed that the original chicken recipe called for a completely different marinade, and for the toum to be used as a dipping sauce for something else entirely. Funny how the little details kick in at the last minute. To make up for the lack of moisture (I doubted that the toum would keep the chicken moist during a long cooking time), I deglazed the skillet I cooked the chicken in with a can of chicken broth and some gin. I didn't bother reducing because (1) I needed moisture, and (2) I wanted to find a way to weaken the gargantuan garlic heat in the toum. In order to justify my decision, I found a recipe online labeled Shish Taouk Toum, which involves making chicken kebabs after marinating in a liquid that included (a tiny amount of) toum. Alright. Somebody made chicken and let it touch the Garlic Death. I was treading in somewhat charted territory. Onwards.

I put the chicken breasts into the oven, slathered with toum, and poured in my deglazing liquid, setting the temperature to 250 degrees. My plan was to make the chicken, taste it, and see if it was too strong to eat. At this point, if it were indeed too strong, I'm pretty sure my plans to fix it involved making rice.

After a couple hours on low heat, I opened the oven. The house smelled like garlic for three days. We eventually served it over orzo. Not the best garlic chicken ever, but not bad either.